WITH SPACE
Exploring and Altering Spatial Concepts through Sound
VERENA LERCHER with GERIET K. SHARMA
GERRIET K. SHARMA is an award-winning sound artist and artistic researcher. He pursued his Dr. artium on Composing with Sculptural Sound Phenomena in Computer Music at the Artistic-Scientific Doctorate School of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.
Currently, he is establishing spaes: lab for spatial aesthetics in sound Berlin working on new compositions, installations, VR exhibitions, and a lecture series. While acknowledging technology as an instrument for spatial manipulation of sound, in his works he follows a phenomenological perspective.
He examines how sound creates space, how space shapes the sonic experience, and how technology shapes our perception of sound as space.
Can sound create space for an alternative perception of the world? What can we learn from sonic spatial aesthetics as a day-to-day practice of world-making inherent to every compositional act? Does space require different listening modes or promote alternation between listening, hearing, and eavesdropping?
This deep-listening session offers the possibility to listen to the complexity and multifacetedness of the building sound-compositions the sound artist and researcher Gerriet K. Sharma composed while living with six different abandoned buildings in various European cities over five years.
The unique environments have been interpreted as sonic spaces and became an integral and tactile part of multi-channel sound compositions using the compositional loudspeaker-tool issit: in situ sound installation toolkit. issit has been developed by the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics Graz (IEM) in collaboration with the composer and offers the possibility to capture correspondences between sound and space. It allows creating and fine-tuning site-specific sound installations.
The deep-listening session is followed by a dialogue between the artist and Verena Lercher with visual details from the buildings discussing the artistic position in the debate about sound/noise, immersion, virtuality, and contemporary architecture marked by the project. The dialogue also scrutinises if sound art engenders a (multisensory) perception that might provide findings about crossmodal environmental or atmospheric interactions between sound and the perceived space.